Rory Waterman : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

It depends what you mean. Musicality is very important to my poems – but I don’t want to my answer to descend into some form of self-aggrandising criticism of my techniques, which will hopefully be apparent to anyone who reads my poems. Suffice it to say that poetry is made of sounds as much as it is made of explicatory language, and no poem can work if it doesn’t do interesting things with both, and between both. Music is important to my life, so it must be important to my poetry on some level. I am a born obsessive, and this week I’ve been waking up every morning to the compilation Joe Strummer 001, which is rich and varied from end to end. It makes me feel good, before I start hitting refresh on a news screen. Next week, it will be something else.

Rory Waterman : part four

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I always share almost everything, as I write it, with the American poet Nicholas Friedman. He knows how to bully me into doing better, and I try to do the same for him. Various versions of the typescript of my third collection, Sweet Nothings – which is being published by Carcanet in May – were also read by Anjna Chouhan, William Ivory and Alan Jenkins. Alan is a superb poet and editor. The other two are neither of these things: Anjna is a Shakespearean scholar and Billy a screenwriter. They’re great readers, tuned in to what I try to do, who aren’t afraid to tell me what they think. They also represent, to some extent, the non-poet audience I’m after, so I feel safer letting the book go now they have seen it. My editor Michael Schmidt is instrumental too. He made one small suggestion for Sweet Nothings that changed everything for the better. Poetry is not, for me, a collective endeavour, and I don’t trust the opinions of most people. But I’m lucky to have these ones to rely on.

Rory Waterman : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I write a lot of reviews, and a lot of my poetry reading has been taken up by that in recent weeks. I write a round-up of poetry pamphlets for PN Review, which is especially good fun because I’m allowed to pick my winners and say why I like them. Recently, that has included new pamphlets by Hilary Menos, Vicki Husband, André Naffis-Sahely, Ramona Hardman and David Van-Cauter. I am also reviewing new books by Don Paterson and Medbh McGuckian for Poetry Review, and Peter Gizzi and Dan Burt for the TLS. I’ve reviewed for almost as long as I’ve written poems with any success, so I can’t quite separate one from the other. Thinking critically about what other poets are doing is, effectively, part of my process; a poem almost requires a public in order to be a poem. I’ve also been working my way very pleasurably through Roethke, Elaine Feinstein, and Les Murray.

Rory Waterman : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Well, a poem can’t be a protest song: the best poems have a tension at their heart, not a simple answer. It can’t depict something in the same way a painting can. It can’t unfold like a novel – unless, of course, it is a novel in verse, and most of those are awful. It can’t affect you directly, on a sub-linguistic level, in the same way music can. But it is the finest, most fine-tuned explicatory art, or so says me – which is also partially why poems are so hard to write well (even though they’re very easy to write badly). Unlike almost any other art, most poems – all the shorter ones, at least – can be memorised. If you memorise a poem, you have it whole, always, wherever you are – the real thing, not the memory of it, or an inferior facsimile. That’s powerful.

Rory Waterman : part one

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1981, and lives in Nottingham, England, where he is on the English faculty at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of three collections from Carcanet Press: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize in 2014; Sarajevo Roses (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize 2019; and Sweet Nothings, published in May 2020. He is also the author of several books on poetry, writes regular criticism for a number of publications, and co-edits New Walk Editions. His website is www.rorywaterman.com.

Why is poetry important?

I’ve asked myself a version of this question quite a lot lately – mainly in the context of my own poetry. There’s nothing like a global pandemic and all its future ramifications to make writing a poem seem like a futile endeavour. It sometimes feels like this is situation impossible to write about while we are all in it, and yet I can’t imagine myself writing about anything else at the moment, at least obliquely or aslant. Nonetheless, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry. At its infrequent best, poetry is a rich form of communication, a complex interchange – and we need that more than ever.